I've been working a little on new ideas for fun and engagement in 2019, and I wanted to create a thread to allow feedback and generate new ideas. As far as I'm concerned, this is a community for the community. In 2019 I could see us doing a lot of new things, including...

1.) Dream Splash VII2.) Some sort of other competition3.) Events in support of CptOvaltine's Cross Symphonic4.) Events in support of Fauntleroy's ROM hack release (alternate scenario version of CT)

I'd love to get thoughts and feedback as we head into 2019! This will be another fun year for the Compendium and the Chrono fanon as a whole! We'll make it great!

We used to have a Spring's Gift and Winter's Fragments contest, for fanart and fiction respectively. Each would last about 2-3 months and would have specific themes/topics. Perhaps we could bring those back to drum up more interest?

If we do, these could be short contests with very specific topics while the Dream Splash could be a catch-all or very general topic.

Ideally, I'd like to have something going every season. Using the above as examples:

Winter - Winter's Fragments (fanfiction)

Spring - Spring's Gift (fanart)

Summer - Dream Splash (super duper extravaganza)

Fallof Guardia - Uh... New Gurus? Hand out candy?

One potential problem with using the older contests is that the awarded rank overlaps with those same categories in the Dream Splash. We could create new ranks, but I'd rather not go crazy with tons of new ranks. Maybe unify the Dream Splash ranks into one? I dunno.

I love all of these ideas. I would really like to think of something to help drum up some new users and activity. I know that's pretty hard to do considering the Chrono series is more or less dead in the game world...but it would be nice to find a way to engage fans and draw them in. Contests are fun, but without some sort of prize it's hard to draw in a new crowd. Maybe that's not the point though, so I might not even matter! None-the-less they're fun for those of us that are active now.

Quote

3.) Events in support of CptOvaltine's Cross Symphonic

I would love to talk more about this. As most of you know I'm planning a Kickstarter campaign for February, and would love to start talking about any ideas and develop a plan for promoting both the campaign and the album.

Having the compendiums support is incredible, and I can't thank you guys enough.

There will be both individual, group, and forum-wide writing events to capture that agonizing spirit of sitting in a dark room because the sun goes down at 5:00PM and the days seem oh so much longer in winter and it's always biting cold and the heat bills rise and Christmas is nice and all, but the constant chaos and materialism and general unkindness of mankind makes it a horrible span of time and work should be getting easier, not more difficult and I think I'm ready to start jobhunting because I am ready for change but that should really come with Spring not Winter but regardless does anyone know of telecommute jobs for tech industry PMs because that would make me happy and warm holiday cheer.

Hold on to your butts. I tried my best to dig up what I could and mark it down here for easy access. A lot of info is missing, either because I couldn't find it or we just don't have it archived. Also, we didn't have contests for every year, and I think some years the Dream Splash would replace the regular Summer's Cry.

Aug. 2007: The first Compendium Dream Splash begins. The theme was "Zeal". A really cool interactive preview for it can be found here. Entries for the first four Dream Splashes can be found here.

That link got me to read the entire Dream Splash haha. I also checked out every other link you provided, thanks!

It was funny seeing a lot of these, especially the 2007's interactive preview , and the april fool's joke, that cheesy+amateurish feeling of old forums got me nostalgic xD

I am looking forward to seeing the new competitions in 2019, 2018 (Dream of Zeal) having entries was a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one given the chrono franchise status, so I am definitely interested in 2019's